


11 : 34

by eddieo-spaghettio (ElsieMcClay)



Category: IT (2017)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Angsty Richie Tozier, Gen, M/M, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie Tozier-centric, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2019-11-28 20:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18213215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElsieMcClay/pseuds/eddieo-spaghettio
Summary: everyone on earth stops moving at 11:34am. or, more precisely, everything on earth stops moving, including the clocks, at 11:34am. Except for Richie.





	1. Richie Tozier Does Not Like the Quiet

|April 7, 1992|

[Derry, Maine]

Mrs.Hickmann’s biology class was not where Richie ever planned to be when his world literally stopped. He never planned to be anywhere, really, when his world stopped as he never planned on his world stopping. It’s not exactly something that a person plans to go through. 

Stanley probably has a plan for this sort of thing, but Richie? He definitely does not. 

He is in the back row of ancient Mrs.Hickmann’s biology classroom, and Eddie is one table over on his left. There is an aisle between them because the old bitch figured out early on that keeping them at the same lab table is a disaster but keeping them any farther than a table apart is somehow almost worse. This is her solution, and Richie has to note that it seems to be working out splendidly for everyone. Except maybe for Richie’s lab partner at his table, but he doesn’t care much for her, so who really honestly gives a shit about her? Not Richie because it’s working out for him. 

That is just to say that this solution is working out terribly, worse than either other option, but the woman is just too tired (or blind from old age) to see that they are still causing just as much trouble as they were during her other two solutions. 

Eddie reaches over the aisle and slides the slip of paper that is already covered in Richie’s messy scrawl in his black pen and Eddie’s cute, curly handwriting in red. There are small doodles in red, too, and they make Richie smile each time Eddie passes the paper over to his table. Richie’s lab partner glares at him as he hunches over the table once more. He grins back and flashes his partner a middle finger into the crook of his elbow just enough so she can see it. She rolls her eyes and scoffs, sneering at the table as she scribbles angrily into her notebook. 

_ we’re gonna get caught _ , Eddie’s newest note says. It says the same thing on the piece of paper four times counting this newest one, yet Eddie still passes it back when Richie gives it to him. 

_ then stop passing it to me, eds. it’s all on your turf now.  _

He passes it back and watches as Eddie squints and struggles to read the writing then sticks the tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he writes back.  _ Cute, cute, cute! _

Richie turns back to his paper so Mrs.Hickmann does not turn around and catch him as she so often seems to. She interrupts his staring at Eddie more often than not, and since Eddie seems to be so paranoid today, he figures he might as well get a few notes taken down. He doesn’t need to, really, because he’s already read the chapter with Eddie and Ben on two separate occasions but he has nothing better to do, and he’s already starting to tune out everything around him as he jots everything down. Hickmann moves the slides too fast every time, but everyone is too scared of her to say anything. One day, someone will tell her to slow it down, but Richie is not that person, and today is not that day. 

That is why the first thing to tip him off as to something being… _ wrong _ is the fact that he actually gets all the notes down on the page without her changing the slide. And as he waits (he’s shocked that he’s  _ waiting _ for a slide change in her class), he realizes that there’s no white noise. He realizes that the girl in the front of the room hasn’t sniffled in more than a minute, and she’s been sniffling nonstop since what feels like the second grade, and the kid with the nasty cough who sits just in front of him is silent—scarily so. Richie glances around, and he finds not even Mrs.Hickmann is talking, and she never so much as pauses for a breath from the moment the tardy bell rings until the end bell rings. He turns to Eddie to make a joke about her silence. He doesn’t know what the joke will be as he turns his head, but he knows it is going to be a good one. He just has to think of a joke first. 

Richie realizes once he faces Eddie that he doesn’t need to figure out what he’s going to say because the words are stolen from his brain and the air from his lungs. His blood turns icy, and his tongue gets ten pounds heavier because Eddie is leaned halfway over the aisle with his arm outstretched to slide the note onto his table. He doesn’t wobble, nor does he make any movement at all. Not even his chest moves with the intake of air. Richie’s brows furrow.

“Eds?” he whisper-shouts. His eyes are still scanning the room for any movement at all, but no one moves. There is no sound, no faint breathing or chairs creaking or doors opening down the hall or lockers opening then getting slammed shut, and no one is talking out in the hall. There are no “high school noises” as Ben calls them. There are no  _ noises- _ noises. It’s dead silent. “Eddie? C’mon. Cut it out,” Richie pleads.

This has to be a sick joke, payback from all of them from something stupid he’s done. He laid off of April Fool’s this year, too stressed with all the testing of senior year—SAT’s, ACT’s, college applications, the works—to do much of anything this year, so it’s not that. But it has to be something. Eddie is not like him; he would not pull something on Richie for the sole sake of pulling something. Richie worries his lower lip and bites the nail on his thumb as he scans the room  _ again _ and tries to recall what he’s done to everyone in this room. Half the people, he doesn’t even know the names of. The other half he’s done nothing to. Tears spring to his eyes because it’s 11:34, and the digital clock has been stopped at that time for however long everyone has been unmoving for, and he didn’t see anyone move to mess with it, and Hickmann is the only one near it, but there is no way she could figure out how to pause it on her own, not with her age. 

But at the same time, there is no way this can be real, he tells himself. It’s all a sick joke, arranged by Eddie as a way to one-up him after last year’s April Fools. This is just catching him off guard, that’s all. It’s almost a week after the day, and it’s been a whole year since Richie’s prank on Eddie. He had to have gotten over it since then, right? Then again, Eddie is known for holding grudges, and he’s known for never  _ not  _ getting payback. Richie wouldn’t doubt it, to be honest. 

But…how did he manage to get everyone in on it, especially in this class out of all the ones they have together? Richie knows for a fact most of the people in here are the party-pooper type--and Hickmann? No way. The old fart would give Eddie detention if he so much opened his mouth in her direction because she doesn’t exactly like him and Richie. Except Eddie is persuasive as all hell (Richie would know, he’s lost countless quarters to him at the arcade even though he always knows Eddie is better than him at  _ Dance, Dance Revolution _ ) and she no doubt hates Richie more than she hates Eddie. 

Richie reaches over and snaps his finger in front of Eddie’s face. If Hickmann is screwing with him, he doubts she would give it up just to yell at him when Eddie is so obviously breaking her rules, too. Still, he watches her for any sign of her moving. There is none. 

“Eds. Eddie. Stop it. It’s not funny. I mean, it would be if you weren’t getting back at me—damn, though, I assume this is for the flash mob last year, but this is a little…it’s too far, so just call them all off, okay?” Richie pleads, snapping his fingers in front of Eddie’s nose. Eddie doesn’t move, and that’s Richie’s second clue as to something being off. 

Richie takes things too far a lot. He makes jokes that no one laughs at because they’re too much, too sensitive of topics and such, but he  _ always  _ apologizes and stops what he’s saying when he realizes that he shouldn’t say shit like that. And his friends do it, too, sometimes because they’re human. They make mistakes, and they apologize, too. But Eddie…he still doesn’t even  _ breathe _ , and Richie—of all people  _ Richie  _ for shit’s sake—has voiced that this, whatever this is, is working him into a sort of panic. 

How long has it been? A few minutes at least, Richie calculates, but the clock is still stuck at 11:34, so he can’t be sure, but it feels like a few minutes (or a lifetime) has passed. And Eddie isn’t breathing; in fact, no one in the  _ room  _ is breathing. They’d have passed out already if this was a joke. Someone would’ve cracked. Someone has to crack. 

_ Someone, please crack. Break down and breathe and laugh and tell me this is all a joke. _

“Eds?” Richie tries once more, his voice cracking as he slips off his stool to kneel in front of him. Eddie’s arm is still outstretched with the note between his fingers. There’s a small grin on Eddie’s face, frozen there, and his eyebrows are doing that cute little thing where they tilt up, and his nose is scrunched. It’s cute, but the look being there for so long is jarring as all hell since usually, it’s fleeting, and Richie can only get glimpses of it. 

Richie’s mind is clouded with panic, panic,  _ panic _ . He can’t think, at least not about anything except for the fact that no one is moving, and there is no noise except for his own sped-up breathing. Not in the room, not even in the school. Maybe not in the whole town; Mike in the middle of petting one of his animals, Ben taking diligent notes in History, Bev’s old smoking spot under the bleachers even if she’s in Portland now, Bill talking with Audra Philips in his creative writing class, and Stan frozen in the middle of doodling a bird he saw while on Mike’s farm over the weekend. Hell, at this point his mind takes him to the whole country being stuck like this. That makes him panic a little bit more. 

How can he get someone, anyone, to move? He searches his mind, pushing apart his panic and jumbled thoughts. He…what does he do? Richie. Richie Tozier. What does  _ he  _ do?  _ What does he do?  _ He makes people laugh. Yes, he can do that. That’s what he does. 

He rushes to find something to say to make Eddie laugh (or hit him because Richie would be pleased with that now more than ever before), but his voice trembles, and he is almost falling out of his chair by now. The only reason it might make him laugh would be to make fun of Richie. 

“Hey, uh, Eds? You’re being just as…as quiet as your mom was last night, you know, trying not to wake you?” Richie stutters, feeling a little like a twelve-year-old Bill. He adds an awkward laugh of his own, trying his hardest to feel normal and feeling especially out of his element when Eddie doesn’t even blink. Richie swallows and sinks to the floor. 

That is where he stays until he is sure that this is not payback, this is not a dream. This is real life, and he needs to find someone else who isn’t frozen. He can already feel an itch settling under his skin.

He does not like the quiet. 

*  *  *  *

Richie loses track of time easily. He was never able to keep on top of things like that, always getting lost in his comics or talking and playing with his friends at the Quarry or around Derry or even, sometimes, just in his mind, thinking. He wishes, now, that he knew precisely how long a minute was or how long an hour was and not just how long they felt because there is no way at all for him to know how much time has passed because the sun is in the same place in the sky that it was when he was in Biology with Eddie, and all the clocks he can find are frozen, arms unmoving, at 11:34. 

He thinks that it might be around mid-afternoon now. Or, it would be, if the sun were still moving across the sky. 

Richie has also never been a runner. Too many cigarettes in his tween years, he used to joke with Bev, who smoked almost as much as he had but still managed to become a swimmer for the Derry swim team. All that time at the Quarry, she used to tell him when he asked how in the  _ hell  _ she managed to pull that off. But now, he practically sprints down the mostly-empty halls of Derry High without stopping until he gets to where he needs to get to: Mr.Burton’s history to see Ben, Ms.Burkett’s creative writing to find Bill, and Mr.Sharpe’s French in pursuit of Stan.

All the classes he needs to get to are on opposite sides of campus, and while he would be thrilled at the prospect of getting to explore Derry High’s nooks and crannies at any other time, he isn’t now—not in the slightest. It is too quiet and too empty while also being full of the normal amount of students. Every once in a while, he’ll come across one or two people walking the halls, ditching class, and he finds even more when he ventures out to the bleachers he and Bev used to smoke under. There are clouds of smoke suspended in the air, and one even has his mouth half open with a puff half out of his mouth. 

He tries not to think too hard about the fact that his friends are frozen. He wonders, briefly as he runs from Ben’s history class out to the bleachers, if they can feel that they’re frozen or if they’re stuck in their minds or if they’re in a situation like him where everyone else is frozen but they’re not or—

He cuts that train of thought off. It is not a thought he wants to dwell on; none of his thoughts right now are ones he wants to dwell on because he knows that if he does dwell, the quiet will get to be too much (more than it already is), and he will work himself into a breakdown, and he will just want his friends ( _ Eddie _ ) to be there to comfort him, but they won’t be there, they are frozen, and he does not know when they will be unfrozen, and until that happens, he will be all alone, and he cannot do this, he  _ cannot do this, he cannot do this! _

Finally, Richie gives into the burning of his lungs and bends over, hands on his knees, and sucks in a few large breaths before standing and leaning back on the lockers. He bashes the back of his head a few times, trying, almost, to bash the thoughts away. He lets out a groan and regrets it because the sound bounces off every locker and off the ceiling, magnifying the sound so much it almost hurts his ears to hear it. 

There is always noise everywhere. Breathing, bugs, the air moving.  _ Noise _ . There is none now, and Richie can’t help but hear the silence screaming at him. He wants to fill it like he normally does, but he can’t form words for some reason. His tongue is heavy, and his fingers are shaking, and for the first time since Eddie drunkenly told him he hates when he smokes about five months ago, Richie craves a cigarette; a whole pack of cigarettes, even. Yes, he could use more than a few cigarettes right now, even a few joints mixed in there. 

Richie goes around the school to his friends twice more, doing everything he knows might make them laugh, though somewhere in his mind, he knows they won’t break, it’s been too long for them to not have breathed. He figures he can only do so much in the school and finds himself stood in front of the front doors of the school, staring at the front yard from behind the glass. 

He doesn’t want to leave. If he leaves, and everyone and everything is frozen and quiet out there, too, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. It’ll be too real. It won’t be his friends playing a prank on him anymore. It will be the entire town of Derry, everyone entirely unmoving. He takes a deep breath and leans his forehead forward onto the glass. He closes his eyes and lets the cool glass ease the thoughts in his head. 

He only has to go to the Hanlon farm. Maybe home, too, if he has the will to do so, which, at this point, he doesn’t know if he can deal with going home. Seeing both of his parents doing everyday things yet rooted to the spot like stone garden statues. Yeah, he decides as he leans on the doors of the school, his hands hovering over the push bar in the middle, he is only going to go to the Hanlon farm. He can’t bear to see his parents like that, though he doesn’t think it’ll be much easier to see Mike in the middle of doing his chores. 

Richie has grown close to the Hanlon family in the recent years. There is something about being out in a field or in the barn with the animals that made everything else feel a little less shitty because  _ nothing  _ compared to the sun beating down on him while he hoed the earth with his weak-ass arms until they burnt so much he couldn’t move and the mix of animal shit making a shit-smelling cocktail in his nose. That’s to say working on the farm was so hellish it made the rest of hell—Derry—seem like it wasn’t so bad. Goodness knows how bad Derry and the people in Derry have been lately, so Richie has spent so much time at the Hanlon farm working that Bill asked him if he was working out now. Of course, that had been a joke (“ha, ha, Big Billiam, we can’t  _ all  _ have your Slenderman-esc body without a little work.”), but Richie cut the arms off one of his t-shirts later that night and wore it to the Quarry the next day. Bill had laughed at him, that day, and asked if he could borrow the shirt one day. 

Oh, how Richie wishes he could hear Bill laughing at him now. 

He is going to figure this out, he resolves, and he’s going to hear his friends again. They’re all going to graduate, and he’s going to work in those fields again. He opens the door and stumbles out onto the concrete stairs. His lungs close up immediately because there are no birds chirping, there’s no wind blowing, and he can’t hear a single horn beeping anywhere out in town. He wheezes and fails to suck in a breath, and he wonders if he should run back in to get Eddie’s spare inhaler from his bag, but the thought of going back in and having to come back  _ out  _ is what has him simply gripping the red, metal railing until his knuckles turn white. He doesn’t know how long he stands there; like he said already, he can’t keep track of time and definitely not when he’s on the verge of passing out on the front stairs of the school. 

Richie needs to find something other than this railing to keep his head from unscrewing from his body and rocketing off into a purer form of panic than where he is now. He glances around wildly, searching for anything to think about other than the fact that there is no noise, no  _ noise, no noise! Where is the noise?  _

A new form of panic fills him, anticipation that he’ll turn the corner and all of a sudden, the bird above old Mr.Leon’s house will caw and flap its wings and keep on moving, and everything will go on again. It settles beneath his skin, itching him because something  _ has  _ to happen. Things don’t simply stop happening—Richie has never been a child genius, but he knows that any scientist would tell you that things do not just stop happening. It is against everything. Something has to happen. 

Richie finds himself driven by this newfound itch to find something happening again. He all but flies down the yellow-beige steps and unlocks his bike from the rack before speeding down the middle of the road, his legs pumping the pedals as fast as he can will them to go, veering left and right to avoid running into the people on the street and all the frozen cars. 

He is panting hard by the time he makes it to the Hanlon Farm on the edge of Derry. He can hardly take in a breath, and he has to take a moment (or more than a few moments) to collect himself and straighten up from his bent position standing next to his bike. He almost wants to remain out of breath so he has a reason not to go onto the farm. His hands shake hard; they have not stopped shaking since, really, the first moment where Eddie remained frozen beyond what any human would be able to. But he catches his breath, and he feels even more on edge just standing there staring at the gate with the hand-painted sign. His hand brushes over the peeling, chipped paint as he passes, leaving his bike sprawled across the grass. 

Richie lasts about two minutes inside the gate before he’s tumbling right back out, skidding onto his knees in the grass next to his bike and throwing up everything he’s ever eaten and sobbing—sobbing  _ hard _ . Tears and snot and bile dribbling down his chin, leaving a sour taste to linger in the back of his throat. The taste is sharp and stabs him each time he swallows down a gasp. His own voice is too loud in his ears, he almost can’t stand to hear it. 

Richie bites back a humorless laugh at the fact that he wants to  _ beep, beep _ himself. Is this how his friends always feel around him? Is this payback for all the times he went too far, talked too much, didn’t listen to them? 

He can’t stand to be on the Hanlon farm. It’s too quiet, and if there is one thing the farm has never been, it’s quiet. There is always a tractor running in the field, tilling and harvesting and replanting, fertilizing, spraying. There is always a sheep baa-ing, a cow mooing, a dog barking, a rooster crowing, a duck quacking, a pig oinking. There is always wind moving through the tall grasses of the western-most field where they don’t plant much. There is always the sound of water running down near the barn where a spring has been steadily eroding the land since he and Mike were both in the eighth grade. And the Hanlon’s themselves were never quiet, not on the farm. Mike was laughing or murmuring in comfort to the animals in the barn, Mrs.Hanlon was always asking them if they needed anything or just making pleasant conversation with Richie and her son. Mr.Hanlon was usually driving the truck around to make sure everything was in place, Mr.Chips sitting in the passenger’s seat, a sight so strangely human they’d all have a good laugh about it, yes a good ol’ chuck, a good ol’ chuck indeed. 

Richie lets the humorless laugh out and wipes his face on the back of his hand (“Gross, Richie! Disgusting!” Eddie would say if he were here— _ But he’s not here, _ Richie reminds himself,  _ he’s frozen way back in that science classroom _ .) then on his jeans. He spits into the grass once, twice, then a third time, but the taste still lingers. He feels like it’s choking him. Maybe it’s the taste choking him, maybe it’s the odd silence and anxiety making him itch at his skin even still after his vomiting spell. 

Richie wobbles on his bike, the handles jerking from side to side. For a long time, he doesn’t know where he’s going as he weaves between people on the sidewalk, most of them in the middle of doing something; talking on the phone or with someone next to them, running to get somewhere on time, eating, driving,  _ living _ . He doesn’t dare interfere with any of them, too scared they’ll come to and be hurt, and it’ll come back around to him. 

He finds himself, maybe hours later (he wouldn’t know, every clock he’s seen says 11:34, just like the one in the science room), in front of his house. There’s never anyone inside this time of day unless he’s sick or his folks have the day off, which is rare. He stares at the front door for a long, long time until it feels wrong, like something about the house is wrong now that he’s looked at it for so long. But he checks and double-checks that everything is right and is in the middle of triple-checking when he’s hit with a sudden thought, one with so much intensity behind it, he wonders how long his subconscious mind has been throwing it around. 

Eddie has never dealt well with idle time. They met in kindergarten because they were both stuck on the fence for fifteen minutes out of the forty-five recess minutes. Richie was there because he’d shouted out just one too many times—

“But, Missus G, it’s like I’ve gotta do it, or else I feel like I’m gonna ‘splode!” 

—and Eddie because he’d gotten up in the middle of “nap time” and started wandering around, going from mat to mat, checking that each and every one of his classmates was still breathing by putting his fingers under their noses until the teacher noticed and told him off. 

“I don’t see what the problem is, Mister. I was jus’ checkin’ on them,” Eddie explained with his innocent, five-year-old doe-eyed stare. “My Mommy does it to me every night, I know so ‘cause I seen her leaving my room a few times.” 

He got an extra five minutes for using “seen” instead of “saw”. 

On that day, it was them and three other kids on the fence. Two of the three other kids were strangers and were therefore off limits to them—stranger danger, they whispered to themselves when Henry Bowers and a boy named Moose spit at both of their shoes. The other was none other than Beverly Marsh, but this was a fact that would forever go undiscovered by any of the three Losers, the memory long distorted by time and details lost to aging brains filled with Algebra and Biology. But for some reason, the two kindergarteners did not see each other as strangers nor dangers. They struck up conversation, Eddie explaining that he couldn’t not do anything, his hands started to feel a little numb at the fingertips when he just let them sit and Richie explaining the feeling of needing to say what was on his mind or else he might burst. In a strange way, they felt like the other understood them. And thus a bond was formed, one that lasted beyond their time on the fence, beyond the bell to go back to class, even. Richie went home that night and told Maggie and Wentworth Tozier about the most kindest boy he had ever met. 

He told them the boy had the prettiest eyes he had ever seen, too. 

Richie finds the urge to yell bubbling up within himself. He cycles to the middle of town and drops his bike onto the asphalt and lets loose, breaking the silence that surrounds him and wraps around him like a vise. He screams. He positively howls. No birds fly away, startled by his noise. No one yells at him, nor does anyone yell back in response to his own yelling. He is the only noise in town, maybe in the world. He yells until the sour taste is gone, replaced by a hoarse stabbing and a feeling that if he talks any more or yells any louder, he is going to taste his own blood. 

Richie leaves his bike and shuffles back to the school. When he gets there, the apprehension crawling in his muscles heightens again. He mostly expects for the Hall Monitor, a junior named Mary, to scold him the moment he opens the front door, but he knows she’s three paces left of the water fountain in the G-Wing hallway. He is only half surprised when she does not greet him at the doors to give him a late pass and a reference to the principal’s office. But he continues, his beat up shoes scuffing against the floor as they drag beneath his weight, his shoulders heavy and face feeling tight with anxiety. 

He arrives back at Mrs.Hickmann’s science room with an added dread. He doesn’t want to see Eddie like this, not again, but Eddie gets so bored when he’s alone. Richie couldn’t live with himself if he left him alone when he knows Eddie can’t stand to be alone for so long. He opens the classroom door and draws in a breath. Richie avoids looking at anyone and rushes to the back of the room where he knows Eddie will be. Richie all but collapses into the side of the desk, knocking it an inch or so back. 

Eddie’s hand is still reaching out, the note between his fingers and his eyes looking at the back of Mrs.Hickmann’s head of thinned-out hair. Richie stares at Eddie’s face, gripping the side of the desk so hard his knuckles are turning so white they’re nearly transparent, and he’s holding his breath like that will make Eddie breathe again. It doesn’t. Eddie doesn’t breathe. 

Richie doesn’t like that thought. He tries not to ever,  _ ever _ let himself think about any of the Losers dying, least of all Eddie. The thought of death has always sent him into a tizzy, freaking him out to the point of not being able to breathe himself. He just…he can’t lose them. They mean too much. He can’t lose them. And Eddie, he isn’t breathing, and not breathing means dead, and Richie can’t feel a pulse because Eddie is frozen just like the rest of Derry—maybe even the state, the country, the world, even—so by all definitions, Eddie is essentially a corpse. Eddie is a corpse sitting in the back row of Mrs.Hickmann’s science class. Richie is the only body with a pumping heart in town. 

Richie’s breath is knocked from him by the force of that thought, by the intensity and the weight of it. He’s alone while surrounded by the same amount of people as he’s always been. 

For the second time today, Richie lets himself cry. For the second time this minute, according to the clocks all around town, Richie lets himself cry. He wails, the sound amplified by the otherwise lack of sound. His body tips to the side, and his cheek ends up somehow pressed to the cool tiled ground next to Eddie’s impossibly clean sneaker. Tears drip across his face and onto the ground from the crooked bridge of his nose. His trembling fingers fumble at the edge of Eddie’s shirt, tugging and gripping and trying to pull himself together. He is gasping for breath and choking on each inhale, weeping so hard that it hurts. His lungs burn. 

*  *  *  * 

Richie stays in town for weeks. He stays in the classroom for at least two weeks. He becomes quite familiar with how all of his peers look. He knows the layout of the room by heart. He starts to make up stories about all of them, names for the ones he hasn’t paid enough attention to know. 

The girl in the seat farthest from the door to the room is called Christine Stewart in his mind. That’s not her name, he knows—Richie thinks it might be Holly. She’s on her phone under the table. He admires her balls for pulling something like that in Hickmann’s class, especially so close to the front. He can’t tell what she’s doing on her phone. She’s texting, but he can’t tell who she’s texting or what they’re talking about. Richie tells himself that she’s texting a secret lesbian lover, who is so terrified of getting caught by her grandparents that they only ever meet each other in school, in bathrooms and closets and emptied classrooms. They’re texting about their lives after Derry, where they’ll go together after graduation and how they’ll be able to meet outside of places like this, out in the open, and no one will give them any shit at all. 

“Wishful thinking, I tell ya,” Richie told “Christine Stewart” once, whistling. “You’ll get outta here, but there’ll still be people.” He patted her wrist that time and moved onto the next classmate, then, but he always asks her how she and her lover are doing every day. She never answers, of course, but it is comforting to act like there is some semblance of normal conversation passing between him and another human being. 

The next of his peers is someone he knows: Carl McCoy. He’s a boy with a muffin-top, a belly hanging over his belt, but he’s one of the best hockey players Derry has ever seen. He’s also picking his nose, frozen in the middle of jamming his pinky up his left nostril, his eyes a little cross-eyed in an attempt to monitor his own progress. He’s nice enough, Richie thinks, in the company of the right people. But he is usually in the company of the wrong people, and that is why Richie has never gotten especially close to him. Richie’s story for him is that he feels lonely in this high school world and acts like an ass just to make someone, anyone, look at him more than once. Carl wants someone to remember his name beyond “the hockey player who won us the game last night.” Richie tells him that he feels the same, but he is not a hockey player, so no one has any reason, really, to remember his name. Then, Richie decides that is a problem for when he is not alone to let his thoughts stew in his own mind. He does not ever come back to talk to Carl. It’s kind of hard to ignore his finger up his nose. 

Antonio Raymond Tate is the next on the class roster. That is not his real name, and Richie knows for a fact that his name is actually Brady Olson, but he seems so much like an Antonio Raymond Tate that Richie has chosen to entirely ignore his real name. He is in the middle of squinting at the board and writing in a scrawl so messy, Richie can’t read it. His story is that he’s trying to go to college, get out of Derry and get somewhere so good it’s like Heaven. He needs glasses, that much is obvious from the almost violent squinting, but his family can’t afford them. It’s not so much of a story as the rest as Richie has heard him complaining about the headaches and the not being able to read so well and fretting that maybe he’s turning stupid, forgetting how to read or something, in the middle of his senior year of high school. The only made-up part is that Richie refers to him as Antonio instead of Brady. 

“I’ll pray for ya, bud,” Richie promises, knowing the last time he had been on holy ground was Stan’s bar mitzvah when they were thirteen. 

There are others—eighteen in total in the class, counting Richie and Eddie—but they are mostly boring. They are frozen in the middle of yawning, stretching, watching the clock, taking notes, and the others are enigmas to him. One girl is staring off into space at nothing. She has no notebook in front of her, no pencil. She looks empty, like there is nothing behind those eyes, but he also finds she looks incredibly sad and pleased all at once. He doesn't know her name. He sort of wants to ask her what she’s thinking about once all of this is over. 

Because it has to be over. It just has to be. 

It takes three weeks more for Richie to leave the school for good. And by for good, he means he does not plan on coming back until Derry gets...unfrozen. By three weeks, he means twenty-one sleeps—or, maybe, it is twenty-three. He can’t remember and seeing as the sun is frozen a little off the middle of the sky and sits there stubbornly without sinking, counting how many times he sleeps is the only way for him to keep track of the days. 

He runs out of snacks a few days before he leaves, and that is what spurs on the idea of leaving. His stomach is rumbling, and his ears are ringing from the silence since, now, he has run out of things to say, stories to tell, jokes to guffaw at. He has run out of words for the first time in his life, and he does not like it. 

Richie sits at the base of Eddie’s table, his back to Eddie, and he thinks. He thinks with a soft laugh to himself Stan would laugh if he told them he was  _ thinking _ . Very funny, Stanley, Richie would say. Very funny. He would wrap an arm around his dear friend Stan’s neck and pull him close, and they would laugh, and no one would be frozen, and Richie wouldn’t be trying to think of where his mother left the keys because there was no way he was going to go searching around her frozen-people-filled office for them. 

The day he leaves, he cries again. He absolutely sobs—the sort of sobbing that has snot running down his face and tears dripping from his chin and jaw and the tip of his nose. It has him sputtering for breath as he looks back at Eddie from the door. His arm has not moved from its position in the air with the note. Richie thinks back to what he last wrote, and he finds he can’t remember what it was. That makes him wail louder, his hands scrabbling to cover his ears as the sound hurts his ears after so long in the deafening silence. He stumbles across the room again with his backpack on his back, and he hangs himself off of Eddie in a pathetic hug. He wraps his arms around Eddie, though the position is awkward with the way Eddie is. Richie’s fingers find each piece of skin that he can reach, and he closes his eyes as hard as he can, willing himself to remember the feel of Eddie because he isn’t quite sure Derry will ever get unfrozen or that he will come back. 

His fingers find the note, and he tugs it out from Eddie’s hand. He unfolds it, and he smiles sadly as he brushes his hand over the red pen and Eddie’s cute scrawl and his own chicken scratch. 

_ then stop passing it to me, eds. it’s all on your turf now.  _

That is the last thing he said to Eddie. Well, not said but communicated, he supposes. It’s so fucking stupid, mundane. Then-Richie had no idea of what was to come for the next however many days it’s been since Eddie and everything else froze. 

_ no, you’re more fun than she is. old hack. _

Richie laughs again at Eddie’s last note to him. It’s entirely Eddie. Richie wondered if he knew anything was wrong before everything stopped. Richie folds the note and slides it into his pocket. This time, when he gets up and stands in the doorway, he finds himself smiling through his tears. 

“G’bye, Eds,” Richie says into the quiet. “I’ll be sure to see the fuckin’ world for you. Or maybe just the states, you know.” He laughs and casts a final look around the room, and then, Richie is gone, running down the empty hallway to the entrance of the school. He barrels down the stairs and doesn’t stop running until he gets to his house. He stands on his front walk for a long time just staring up at the house he had lived in his whole life. Eventually, he works up the nerve to enter the house and get clothes and food and the car, and soon enough, he’s backing the car out of the garage and whipping down the frozen streets of Derry. He glances at the rearview mirror and finds a woman in the middle of a step crossing the street. His eyes snap back down to the road, and he clutches the leather wheel tighter in his hands, so hard his knuckles are turning a transparent white where the skin stretches around his bones. 

His car flies past the sign (“ _ LEAVING DERRY! COME BACK SOON! _ ”). He keeps driving for a long time, the only company being the trees and grass of Maine in spring. He doesn’t know where he’s driving. Richie drives in silence; the radio isn’t playing anything, which, he thinks, makes sense as radio waves must be frozen, too. 

It takes him longer than it should to get to the city. He avoids Bangor, instead opting for Portland. He takes the long way. He gets lost, he thinks, but he can’t be sure. 

Richie arrives in Portland three days after he left Derry, and that is when everything seems to go to Hell. Richie has been avoiding thinking about it, about how alone he is. He has not seen a single thing move; each time he looks up and sees a bird in the middle of the sky, he looks the other way before he can think about what it means, and he hasn’t driven through a single city or town if he can avoid it. When he has to, he drives as fast as he can, careful to not hit any person or car. Otherwise, he hums to himself and focuses every bit of energy in his body on the road. 

Portland ruins his plans. He doesn’t know why he thought a big city would be such a good idea if he couldn’t stand to see a single person on the streets in Derry. But the thing to break him is mundane. 

Richie breaks down at a traffic light. The light is frozen on red, and on instinct, he stops. He sits there in his car for a long, long time before he realizes that the light is not going to change to green. It is that thought that has a sob ripping out of him before he can stop it. 

The light is not going to move. The people to his left are not going to move. The radio is not playing music. No one is talking. Richie screams and hits his hands off the wheel. He weeps, curling up in the driver's’ seat of his parents’ car while sitting at a traffic light on the outskirts of Portland, Maine. Pathetic, his mind tells him, but he doesn’t give a fuck because Richie Tozier is alone in a world full of people. 

He never liked the quiet, but the quiet is all he has now.


	2. Notes and Noise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He—he would’ve called,” Stan sobs, his cold, wet hands clutching at the front of Eddie’s sweater. “I know Richie better than I know anyone, and I know he would’ve called by now. Bill is wrong—he didn’t just leave. He wouldn’t just leave.”  
>  Eddie holds Stan until he falls into a troubled sort of sleep. Then, Eddie cries, too.   
>  “He’ll come back,” Eddie promises into Stan’s hair. “He’ll come back, I know he will.”   
>  But weeks pass, and there is no sign of Richie. The teachers are getting increasingly annoyed by how many days he’s missed, and the end of the school years grows closer and closer, still with no Richie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MAJOR TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR PART OF THIS CHAPTER: Suicide Mentions
> 
> PLEASE DO NOT READ IF THIS IS NOT A HEALTHY TOPIC FOR YOU TO READ ABOUT. Be safe. 
> 
> follow my tumblr: eddieo-spaghettio

| 891 sleeps after Portland |

[Somewhere in California]

Richie stares down at his hands where they lay in his lap. He sits on the beach, the water frozen around his feet where he has them submerged. He looks up and sighs, craning his neck to stare at the sky. 

It’s nice here, he thinks. He likes California. He liked Oregon when he was there, too. And Montana was gorgeous. He was up in Canada, what? Thirty, forty sleeps after Boston? He loved it up there, but it was so cold, and he didn’t think Eddie would like it. 

Eddie would like California. 

Richie has kept himself moving over the past many, many sleeps since Maine. He does not like keeping in one place. He feels too much like all the people frozen on the streets when he stops moving. He is too scared to turn into them, too scared to stop moving, too scared he’ll wake up one morning and find himself stuck in one place. He still, even after all this time, does not know if they know what is going on or if all of them are well and truly frozen, even their minds. Richie finds he is not keen—not in the slightest—to find out. 

Richie has not stopped moving for more than one night since he left Portland. He stopped in Bangor. He visited some obscure family member Bev once told him she had there, an aunt or a cousin or some estranged niece, he couldn’t remember. Then, he drove to Boston…then Canada…then back to Washington D.C., and so on. 

He liked to think each location was random, but he stole a camera in Boston, leaving spare change he had on him from Derry in its place and praying there would one day be someone to collect it. He told himself he didn’t know why he stole that camera for a long time, but he was in Arizona when he realized he knew what he was doing. 

Every place he went, he took pictures, and he took them for Eddie. He thought, each time the shutter clicked, of the time Bill went to London with his parents and Georgie but came back with one picture, and it was a picture of him and Georgie in front of a London road sign. Needless to say, Eddie was livid. Richie did not hear the end of Eddie’s complaining for a week after Bill got back:

“I love Bill to death,” Eddie said as he paced the length of Richie’s messy bedroom, “but he’s a fucking  _ moron _ .” Richie nodded, but he was not listening. He had heard the same spiel so many times, and he had a new issue of one of his favorite comics spread out in front of him, and he was willing himself to memorize each and every detail on the page. 

He wishes, now as he sits on a California beach, he had listened to Eddie complain about how much of a dumbass Big Bill was and committed every detail of  _ Eddie  _ to his memory instead of that damn comic he can’t even remember the name of anymore. 

But he made sure to take pictures for Eddie. He too pictures of the people, of the storefronts, the sky, the forests, and all the sights of America he had managed to see. He found a map, just a little ways out of Maryland, stuffed into the glovebox. He thanked God for his parents and their wishes to travel across the country and hit all the things they could on the way to the West Coast the moment he graduated and left for college. He used to joke they wanted him out of their hair so they could just leave already, and they used to laugh, and Went would ruffle his hair and tell him “Well, Mags, he’s figured us out! You might as well get out of here now, Rich!” 

The thought of his parents made Richie bite back a sob. He missed them—God, he missed them. He missed Maggie humoring him when he joked and she didn’t understand, and he missed his father mimicking his Voices even after all these years when they all knew any other parent in the world would tell him to grow up and leave all the childish jokes behind. Yes, he missed them more than anything in the world, even more than the sound and the movement. 

After he found the map, he made himself a plan. He was going to keep moving, and he wasn’t going to stop until something changed, until everything started moving again. He stole the camera, and he started crossing off all the places he visited. 

He was in Arizona almost two-hundred sleeps after Derry. That is when everything went to shit.  _ Fucking Arizona _ . 

Richie was dealing with it well, he thought. He hadn’t cried since he thought of his parents, and he had gotten good at avoiding looking at all the people on the street while he drove through towns and cities. He stopped letting himself think because thinking, Richie found, was dangerous. 

But in Arizona, he sat on the roof of his beaten, dented and dirtied car, and he admired the Grand Canyon. He raised the camera and took three different pictures, one of the Canyon, one of himself next to the cliff into the valley, and one final snapshot of the sign outside the road into the visitors’ area. Then, he set the camera down and slipped his hand into his back pocket to pull out the crumpled and creased note from Eddie back in the science classroom. 

He unfolded it for the billionth time, and Richie ran a thumb over Eddie’s writing. Richie clutched the paper in one hand and brought the camera back to look through his pictures with the other. He stared at the picture of himself for a long time, longer than he ever would have looked at any picture of himself back when everything was unfrozen.

Richie never particularly liked his face. His nose was too hooked, he thought, and his skin too pimply. His cheeks always looked so skinny, and his hair was forever a mess. But now…now, he didn’t recognize himself. Richie thought he was skinny before, but he could see how unhealthy it was, now, and his hair was almost to his shoulders. It was greasy and frizzy and even more of a mess than it had ever been in his life. His skin was disgusting. 

Richie dropped the camera back to his side and held the note tighter. He made a vow to shower before he saw Eddie again. 

_ and if you never see him? will you ever shower then?  _

Richie’s breath was knocked out of him by that. He didn’t let himself think, and this was the reason why. It was dangerous. It made him think dumb things like never seeing Eddie again…but the longer the world went without moving, the less hope he had for ever seeing Eddie move again. 

Richie jumped off the roof of his car and threw the camera into the backseat with his backpack and refolded the note. He sat behind the steering wheel and clutched at it and breathed so hard his vision started to get darker and darker. He couldn’t get enough air, he thought, he couldn’t breathe. His knuckles were white where the skin pressed against his bones. He caught his reflection in the mirror, and he heard himself groan at the sight, the sound distant. His hands fumbled for the half-empty box of cigarettes he stashed in the console. He lit one and took a long drag, but it didn’t help with his nerves, not one bit. 

He had taken up smoking again, he thought, and Richie felt a million times more guilty. He promised his friends he would stop, and he did, but he couldn’t…he couldn’t breathe, and this was supposed to help his nerves—it used to help, so why wasn’t it helping now when he needed it more than ever before in his life? 

He closed his eyes so tight tears rolled out from the corners, and he sobbed. He needed Eddie. He needed his mom. He needed Bill or Bev or Mike or Ben or Stan. He needed  _ someone _ . He had  _ no one _ . 

Richie left the Canyon and found himself in a gun store. He stole a gun and did not leave money to pay for it and stashed it in his backpack and refused to let himself look at it as it sat in the backseat of his car. But it was there. 

It was always there, a burning thought in the back of his mind. 

More than once, in his lower moments of being so, so utterly alone in the too-big world, Richie found himself staring into the mirror at the bag, not moving, not breathing. At some point, after an escapade of drunkenness, he came into himself again and found the back open and poured out over the passenger's’ seat. He did not know what he was going to do in his drunken state, and he was glad he passed out when he did. 

That was during the period where he only remembered snippets of the days, the time where he believed wholly this was some fucked up dream. Maybe he was in a coma. If it was a damn coma, he wished his fucking brain would wake up and let him out of this nightmare. 

He broke into bars and stole bottles and bottles of alcohol. He danced without any music in the dank, smoky dark of bars across the States. He drank and drank until he forgot anyone was frozen, until his vision was so blurred it didn’t matter if they were moving or not. 

On more than one occasion, he woke with a pounding headache and no memory of the previous day. He would throw up onto the street and stumble back to his car from whatever damp alleyway he woke in, and the cycle would repeat once he drove himself into the next town and found himself another bar or alcohol vender. 

Sometimes, while he was waiting out the terrible hangover, Richie would drive up and down rural roads or he would find himself a cliff and sit on the edge of it and swing his feet forward and back, forward and back. He would think about what it would feel like…falling through the air.

And he would put a stop to that thought the moment he had it. He would stand up and lock himself in his car and back away from the precipice so fast it was a wonder he never hit any trees on his way out. 

There were times where he yelled into the silence just to hear some noise again. Sometimes, he thought he heard six voices behind his, and he wouldn’t feel so alone. He would wonder if he was going mad, and then he would yell again to drown out the thinking. He would yell and scream and wail until his throat was raw and he couldn’t yell any longer. 

He did not touch the gun again for seven hundred sleeps. Richie did not let himself touch the gun again, not when he was thinking shit like that. He looked at it, and Richie even had more than a few dreams about it—nightmares, more like, but they found him in his sleep either way. They came in many forms.

One was a dark shadow wielding the weapon against him, always waking in a cold sweat as its finger pressed on the trigger. Another showed appeared as Richie sitting in a dark infinity with nothing but the gun in an illuminated circle in front of him. There were many others, so many others. Richie could not count them all on both of his hands, and he woke in a panic more often than not since he stole the gun. 

Here he is, however, nursing the gun in his hands while sitting on a beach somewhere in California. He stares at the sky as sweat gathers in the divet of his spine in his back and rolls down his skin. He can smell himself, and he is almost glad no one is around to see him like this. He does not remember the last time he showered. 

Richie crashed his car somewhere in Nevada and walked the rest of the way here. His feet ache. His legs are mostly numb. His hair is tangled, and his hands are dark with dirt. His fingers have not stopped shaking since he crashed the car, and the cut above his eyebrow has still not stopped bleeding. He thinks he collapsed somewhere near Sun Valley and his head has not felt the same since. Richie has had a pounding headache for so long, and it has gotten so bad that the unmoving sun pulsates in the sky. He stumbles on every step. 

Richie collapses with his feet submerged in the tide. At some point, he picks up the gun and cradles it in gentle, trembling hands. He can’t take his eyes off of the dirtied metal or his darkened hands. 

Yes, he thinks, Eddie would like California. He would like California very much. Richie likes California, but he wants to go home. He yearns for Derry, but that is not what home is to him anymore. He wants  _ Eddie _ and he wants the  _ Losers _ . He wants his family back, he thinks, and his fist closes around the handle of his gun. 

_ His gun. When had it become  _ his  _ gun? When did it stop being  _ the  _ gun?  _

Tears blur his vision. He wipes a hand under his nose. He’s cried so much in the past many sleeps, more than he thinks he has in his entire life. Pathetic. 

It’s too much, he reasons with himself. The whole fucking world is frozen except for him. It’s too much, and he has gone for so long. 

Richie tells himself he can go for longer, he can wait for the world to change. But as he stares at all the people, young and old, frozen in the ocean, he doesn’t know if he quite believes it. Can he wait any longer? Can he go another day with no one but himself as company? 

No, he thinks as he stares at his hands where they cradle the gun, he can’t. 

He can’t do this.

He can’t do this.

_ He can’t do this! _

And then, with a sudden, overwhelming rush, the noise knocks Richie backwards onto the sand like a wall slamming into him with the force of a million armies behind it. The gun slides away from his hands, and he curls into a ball and clutches at his ears. Richie groans and closes his eyes like that will drown out the sound. 

A child screams. The waves crash against the beach. A mother yells. Teenagers laugh loudly. It hurts, it  _ hurts, it hurtsmakeitstop! _

Richie staggers to his feet and stumbles away, half doubled-over and still holding his hands over his ears. He realizes, belatedly, the gun is still on the beach, but he is too scared to go back for it.

A car whizzes past, nearly hitting Richie dead-on as it passes. He stumbles back, away from the road and watches the car grow smaller the farther away it gets. 

That’s when it hits Richie—he is in California when he should be in Derry, the whole way across the country with no way to get back.  _ Fuck _ . 

*  *  *  *

When Richie does not take the note from between his fingers, Eddie looks away from watching Mrs.Hickmann to whisper at Richie to  _ take it already! _ What he finds is an empty seat with Richie’s notes still on the table. In his surprise, Eddie loses his grip on the edge of his table and tumbles from his seat. The class goes silent as Eddie’s face burns bright red. 

He watches as Mrs.Hickmann’s old eyes move across the room and catch on Richie’s empty seat, widening when she realizes he was there and now he’s not before she moves onto Eddie.

“Mr.Kaspbrak,” she growls, “is there a reason your butt has taken residence on the floor instead of in your seat?” 

“N-No, ma’am. Sorry,” he murmurs and drags himself back into his seat. Someone snorts, and Hickmann’s eyes move to them to chew them out next. Eddie hunches back over his notes, but he can’t stop staring at Richie’s seat.

_ Where the fuck did he go?  _

“Mr.Kaspbrak, stay for a moment,” Mrs.Hickmann insists when the bell rings, and Eddie pauses in gathering up his things. He nods and shoves his binder into his stuffed backpack. “Richard  _ was  _ here, wasn’t he? I seemed to have marked him down as ‘here’, but I didn’t see him in his seat, and I didn’t see him leave,” she explains, and Eddie knows he isn’t going crazy. 

“Um, I’m not sure,” he lies with a half-shrug and a less-than-convincing smile. She tuts her tongue and turns back to her attendance book as the next period class starts to file in. 

“Thank you, Edward.”

“Yeah, yeah, no problem.” Eddie practically sprints out the door and barely makes it to his lunch table before the late bell. Stan and Ben are already sitting down, and Eddie sees Bev waiting in line. 

“Guys, something happened,” Eddie rushes out, and Stan and Ben whip around to look at him.

“What? Where’s Rich?” Ben asks, craning his neck to look around Eddie.

“Is he smoking again? He promised—”

“No, Stan, he isn’t smoking, but I think I ought to wait for Bev to tell you. Someone will have to tell Ben and Mike later,” Eddie interrupts. The three sit in silence until Bev slams her red lunch tray down on the table. 

“What’s up, fuckers?” she greets, and Ben glances up.

“Eddie has something to tell us,” he murmurs. “It’s about Richie.”

“Oh! You guys finally—”

“Bev!” Eddie shrieks, and she shuts up with a short laugh. She waves her hand in front of her. 

“Where is the Trashmouth, anyway?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you—I don’t know where he is because he just…he just  _ disappeared! _ ” Eddie says.

“People don’t just  _ disappear _ , Eddie,” Stan tells him.

“I know that, but Richie did. We were passing notes in science—”

“Mrs _.Hickmann’s  _ science?” Bev gasps, but Eddie doesn’t stop talking. 

“—and I looked up, and he was just gone!” 

“Did he say anything on the note about leaving? Skipping, maybe?” 

“Not that I can remember.” 

“Well, where’s the note?” Bev asks. Eddie pats down his pockets and finds all of them empty. 

“I had it. I was leaning over the aisle to pass it back to him, and he was gone when I looked up, but the note’s gone, now.” 

“Okay, what the  _ fuck _ is going on?” Stan spits, pushing his lunch away from him. No one answers. The four of them keep murmuring about what could possibly be happening, all but Eddie insisting it was probably just Richie getting restless here in Derry and deciding to leave. 

“He wouldn’t just leave, you all know that. He was restless, sure, but he told us he was waiting for graduation. And he would’ve told us,” Eddie reasons. 

“Maybe not,” Ben argues weakly. 

“I guess we just have to wait. He’ll probably call, right?” All three of his friends nod, and the bell for next period rings a moment later. “Someone fill in Bill and Mike,” Eddie says, “We can meet at the Quarry tonight at the usual time.” 

That night, when the sun is setting across the Quarry, Eddie sits on a rock and tells the story again to Bill and Mike. They, like the other three, don’t believe it. 

“We all know Richie,” Bill insists, and Eddie loves the man to death, but he has never looked more punchable in his life. Eddie supposes this is what Richie felt like when Eddie broke his arm and Bill insisted on going back down to fight It. 

“No, you don’t understand!” Eddie tells Bill with so much heat in his voice Stan flinches away from him. “He was there passing notes to me in science and then  _ poof! _ He was just gone! Sounds less like Richie and more like It!” Eddie huffs and grabs his coat from beside him. He storms off up the path to the road, five pairs of wide eyes following his form as he leaves. 

Eddie does not speak to Bill—or most of the other Losers, for that matter—for a week and a half after the night at the Quarry. It isn’t until Stan shows up at his house that Eddie’s anger wanes. It’s raining (how absolutely  _ cliche _ , Eddie thinks as he opens the door and the wind rushes past him) when Stan knocks on his front door. Stan is soaked and shivering and, Eddie later realizes,  _ crying _ . 

“He—he would’ve called,” Stan sobs, his cold, wet hands clutching at the front of Eddie’s sweater. “I know Richie better than I know anyone, and I know he would’ve called by now. Bill is wrong—he didn’t just leave. He  _ wouldn’t  _ just leave.”

Eddie holds Stan until he falls into a troubled sort of sleep. Then, Eddie cries, too. 

“He’ll come back,” Eddie promises into Stan’s hair. “He’ll come back, I know he will.” 

But weeks pass, and there is no sign of Richie. The teachers are getting increasingly annoyed by how many days he’s missed, and the end of the school years grows closer and closer, still with no Richie. 

Eddie finally breaks an hour after graduation. He is sitting in Bill’s basement with the rest of the Losers, nursing a beer that tastes absolutely disgusting, and Eddie’s chest bubbles with anxiety. Something just feels  _ wrong _ . 

He is crying before he even realizes it, and his friends are all circled around him, looking worried. 

“He should be here,” Eddie insists. “He was so excited about graduating—he should  _ be here! _ ” Eddie sobs into Ben’s chest as the rest of his friends hold him tight. Bev rests her chin on his head, her chest to his back. 

“I’ve had enough of waiting,” she says, and he hears the sadness and the tears in her voice, too. “We have to go looking for him.” Stan nods, Eddie feels it where his face is buried into Eddie’s side. 

“Thank you, thank you,  _ thank you _ ,” Eddie repeats, his hands scrabbling to hold his friends tighter. 

Thus begins their plan to find Richie and bring him home again. It starts in the Denbrough’s basement at some point around midnight, and they plan and talk until sunrise. At some point, they are all pleasantly tipsy, and that turns into six newly-grads giggling to each other, and that turns into sharing stupid stories of things Richie did when only one or two of them were around. There are a lot of that kind of story. 

They laugh and laugh until they are all in stitches and can hardly breathe, but all six still feel like there should be a seventh voice there. They are going to find that voice, they promise themselves, even if it takes them years of searching. 

Three days later, they disembark. The plan is to visit all the cities Richie ever even so much as mentioned, even just in passing. In their planning, they conjured up quite the list, and for a while, it is a promising list. 

But as time goes on, the more cities they cross off the list, the less promising the list makes itself out to be. The car is almost always silent, now, as they drive, the only sound the radio, and even then, the signals are weak and staticy. 

“Pull over at the next rest stop, won’t you?” Bev requests, her voice muffled from the odd angle she has her head turned to to look out the window. “I’ve gotta piss.” From where he drives, Mike nods. 

Almost an hour later, he turns the car into a mostly empty parking lot outside a rest stop. Bev launches herself out the door and disappears in a split second through the door of the ladies’ restroom. The rest of the Losers crowd around the car, Ben and Mike leaning over the top with a map and a pen, circling all the possibilities of stopping for the night and where to look for Richie. Eddie turns and scans the rest stop.

“I’m going for a walk,” he murmurs. The sun is setting, now, but the air is still warm, warmer than it ever would have been back in Maine. Sweat and humidity gather on his skin. No one replies, and Eddie stuffs his hands deep into his pockets and turns on his heel to wander around the stop. 

He comes to an overhang with benches and a vending machine. One of the three benches is occupied by a sleeping man turned on his side. He grunts and groans, his hand twitching at his side. The other hand is still clutching at the bag under the man’s head, even in his sleep. 

“No,  _ no _ ,” the man mutters. He grunts three times, low and deep. Concern bubbles in Eddie’s mind, the instinct to wake the man up and make sure he is okay overtaking the want to run away and let someone else deal with him. 

“Wake up, it’s okay,” Eddie starts softly, his hand hovering above the guy’s shoulder, but before he can reach any further to shake him awake, the guy’s hand wraps around Eddie’s wrist. “Hey!” he cries in protest and tugs on his wrist until the guy lets it go. Eddie holds his hand against his chest and gets himself ready to rip the guy a new one. 

However, the breath is knocked out of his chest when he looks up and finds  _ Richie _ , of all people, huffing and taking in long, shaky breaths as if to calm himself down from a panic. 

“Richie?” Eddie asks, not believing his eyes. Richie’s head shoots up so fast it has to hurt his neck, but the response is all Eddie needs to confirm his suspicions. 

Richie looks different— _ way  _ different than he did the day he disappeared into thin air. His hair is longer and rattier, as if he hadn’t washed it or brushed it or even ran his fingers through it in years, and his clothes are ripped and wrinkled and so smelly Eddie can smell the odor wafting off of him even from where he stands two feet away. 

“Eds?” Richie whispers, his voice cracking and hoarse. 

“Here, Rich, don’t move. I’ll get the rest of the Losers, okay?” 

“The—the rest…” He trails off. 

“Guys, guys, come here, quick!” Eddie calls across the parking lot. All five of the other Losers, Bev having returned from the bathroom by now, look up, and Mike must sense the urgency in his tone as he breaks into a run to get to Eddie almost immediately. The others follow as fast as they can. 

“Eddie?”

“What is it?”

“Are you okay?”

“It’s  _ Richie! _ ” Eddie breaks through the rest of their frantic voices, pointing them to where Richie is curled up on the bench, chest still heaving and eyes avoiding looking at the Losers. 

“Holy  _ shit _ .” And of course they would find their missing friend entirely by coincidence. Of course they would stop where he is simply because Bev had to piss at that very moment. Of  _ course _ . 

The moment Richie looks up is when it really, truly hits all of them. They found him. They found him, they found Richie. After all this time, they found him. 

Richie’s hand, shaking and weak, reaches out and catches on Eddie’s shirt, and that is all it takes for him to break. He falls to his knees onto the concrete and buries his head in Eddie’s stomach. Eddie’s arms wrap around his head. 

“I couldn’t shower,” Richie sobs as he collapses into Eddie’s arms. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry.” His voice is hoarse and hard to hear, but his hands scramble across Eddie’s back, trying to find purchase to get closer to him.

“It’s okay, Rich. Don’t worry. It’s okay, I’ve got you now,” Eddie murmurs as he presses Richie’s head even more into his chest. 

It takes a long time for Richie to calm down, and when he finally does, his breaths are still shuddering, and he watches his friends like he can’t believe they are really here with him. 

“Richie…where were you?” Bill asks, and Richie’s eyes widen. 

“I wanna go home,” Richie answers, his voice still so, so quiet—quieter than any of them have ever heard it in the entire time they’ve known Richie—and no one objects. They help him to the car, and he collapses in the backseat with Eddie, Bev, and Ben. The seven of them—they’re  _ seven _ again, Eddie thinks euphorically—sit in heavy silence for a long, long moment before Mike puts the car into gear and starts pulling out of the parking lot. 

Richie seems like he is on the verge of passing out as he leans most of his weight onto Eddie’s shoulder, his face buried in his neck. He is still mumbling about not showering, and Eddie is still comforting him, telling him it’s okay—because it is. Eddie is just so fucking happy to have Richie back, even if he smells and he looks as if he’s been through absolute Hell and back three times over. Eddie runs his fingers through Richie’s tangled hair, working at the knots and the curls. 

Richie’s hand grabs onto Eddie’s wrist again, just as he is about to drop back off into sleep. His other hand works at something behind his back until he procures a crumpled piece of paper and shoves it into Eddie’s palm, his eyes meeting Eddie’s for the first time since Eddie woke him up from his nightmare on the bench. 

Eddie unfolds the paper, and his stomach drops and grows fuzzy. Tears fill his eyes. 

“This is—it’s the note. From that day in class, isn’t it?” Eddie asks, and Richie nods, the movement jerky. Eddie reads over the paper, finding what seems like a million more scrawled messages added to the original note. 

_ i miss you  _

_ you’d like california  _

_ boston is goregous _

_ i think i might love you a little bit _

_ i need to hear your voice again or i think i might go crazy _

_ please start moving again soon  _

_ i cant do this anymore, im sorry _

_ i cant  _

_ i cant  _

_ i cant _

By the time, Eddie scans over all of the notes, Richie is asleep, and Eddie’s heart is breaking. What happened to him? 

Eddie looks up, and all the Losers are silent. He looks closer and finds that all five of the others are crying. Bev is clutching Richie’s hand in one of her own. Stan is holding onto her other hand like he’ll fall apart if he lets go. Mike drives with his hands tight around the steering wheel and tears absolutely pouring down his face. Bill and Ben hold each other where they are both stuffed into the passenger’s seat. 

Mike drives and drives until the moon is high in the sky and everyone else is asleep. His eyes feel heavy and dry, and the lights on the street of this town he is driving through blur as he passes them. 

“Come on,” he murmurs as he pulls into a motel parking lot, “everyone up. I think it’s time we stop for the night.” One-by-one, the Losers wake, stretching their arms above their heads and yawning. Eddie brushes a hand over Richie’s cheek, and he jumps violently, making an incoherent noise of fright. Eddie retracts his hand immediately, and the Losers freeze. 

“We’re just stopping to let Mike sleep, all right?” Eddie reassures him, and Richie nods, still looking as if he could not believe the Losers are really in front of him. His hand fumbles for Eddie’s, and their fingers link. Neither Eddie nor any of their friends say anything about it. 

Eddie leads him into the motel lobby, following behind the other five Losers. Bev and Stan lean heavily on each other, and Ben walks a step behind them to make sure they don’t fall on their faces. Mike and Bill talk quietly in the front of the moving congregation. 

“Two rooms, please,” Mike requests, and he goes to hand the man behind the counter a wad of cash, but Richie cries out.

“No!” he yells, just a little too loud to be normal. “Can’t be alone, can’t wake up ‘n find you all frozen again.” And he looks so scared that his friends and the man behind the desk pause. 

“It’s all right, Rich,” Bev assures him and steps through the group to the front desk, “One room, then.”

“For the seven of you? It’s gonna be tight.” 

“We’re used to it, it’s okay,” Bill cuts in, glancing worriedly back at Richie and Eddie. Eddie meets his eye and shrugs before going back to getting Richie to calm back down. 

The man hands over a key, and Mike unlocks the room when they get to it. They all file in, glancing around at the single bed, small bathroom, and stained, uncomfortable chair pushed into the corner of the room.  

The motel room is the first place Richie feels safe since the classroom back in Derry before time froze. He thinks it is less because of the bed and the fact he actually gets to shower and more the fact that his friends mill about the room—they  _ move around _ —until all six are settled on the ground and in the beds. 

He lays on his back and listens and stares at the ceiling for what feels like forever. Eddie is asleep beside him, the rest of the Losers arranged haphazardly on the ground. 

But the silence gets to be unbearable, too much like how it was. He sits up and slips carefully, silently out of bed. 

When Eddie wakes, he is alone in the bed. There is a moment where he forgets where he is and what had happened just that evening, but it all came back to him in a split second, so fast he gasped and fumbled for where he knew—or thought—Richie slept. When his hand came up empty, he sat up in a panic and just about woke the rest of the Losers up before he saw Richie, crouched on the chair in the corner of the room, his knees drawn to his chest and his hands gripping his shins. 

He doesn’t seem to notice that Eddie is upright in the bed. Eddie watches him for a long moment as his eyes catch on Mike’s chest and watch until it falls and rises, then Richie’s gaze moves onto the next Loser, watching them until they, too, move.

“What are you doing over there, Richie? Why aren’t you sleeping?” Eddie whispers, and Richie’s breath catches in his throat, Eddie can hear it. He watches Eddie, now, until Eddie throws the covers back and steps over his friends’ heads to kneel in front of where Richie sits. “What are you doing?”

“I’m just watching,” he says just as quiet as Eddie is talking, “making sure.” Eddie wants to ask what he’s watching for, but he thinks the topic is too heavy for tonight. He takes Richie’s hand and leads him back to the bed. 

“I promise it’s going to be okay. Whatever it is you’re worried about won’t happen. If it does, I’ll be here to make it better, okay? No one is going to hurt you here,” Eddie tells him.

When Eddie wakes up again, Richie is back to crouching on the chair, but this time, it is light out, and he is talking softly with Stan, his eyes catching on Mike as he moves past to the bathroom, then moving to Bev as she sits up in bed, and so on. He watches in almost… _ fascination _ as they move, like he isn’t used to the sight. No one comments on it. 

On the way back to Derry, days and days later, Richie asks if they can stop at the Grand Canyon.

“Lost all my pictures from there,” he murmurs. “Wanna go back with all of you.” 

When they pull into the visitors’ area, Richie opens his door and stumbles out before the car has even stopped moving completely. He tugs Eddie out behind him, leaving the rest of the Losers to cry out in surprise. Stan brakes as fast as he can, and Richie’s friends follow him to the edge of the precipice. He stands with his toes nearly on the very edge, and he throws his head back, and he lets loose.

Richie’s scream is loud and echoing, and Eddie watches only for a moment before Stan takes Richie’s other hand and yells, too. Bev takes Stan’s other hand, Bill takes Eddie’s, Ben takes Bev’s, and Mike takes Bill’s. It’s a line of seven teenagers, tired and dirty and a  _ family _ , all of them yelling as loud as they can get themselves to yell. Seven voices, all as one, echoing around the Canyon until they can yell no more, at which point they dissolve into laughter. It is the first time Richie has smiled in so long. It is the first time he has felt like he isn’t alone in so,  _ so long.  _

In his euphoria, Richie takes Eddie’s face between his hands and kisses him, then and there on the edge of the Grand Canyon. The rest of their friends hoot and holler and laugh, wrapping their arms around each other. 

It’s perfect. It’s loud. It’s a flurry of movement. It’s everything Richie has been wanting and waiting for since 11:34am on April 7, 1992. 


End file.
